Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says he will not run as an independent candidate for president.

Howard Schultz. The Hill/Getty.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says he will not run as an independent candidate for president in 2020. The Hill. Schultz, a lifelong Democrat, wanted to run as a "centrist" alternative to the current Democratic Party, which has veered to the left. Schultz said that he feared that his run would ensure that President Trump would gain a 2nd term, but also feared that the left wing Democratic candidates would alienate voters. Schultz also cited a back injury and three surgeries to treat it, had prevented him from campaigning. 

My Comment:

Though Schultz was never really much of a contender I always thought he was a big threat to the Democratic Party. If he had ran in 2020 and a far left candidate like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris ran, he had a very good chance of splitting the party. Indeed, a more centrist independent candidate would probably get move votes than the Democrats, given Schultz's massive amount of money and influence. 

Of course, a split Democratic Party would ensure that President Trump would win in a landslide. Trump's almost certainly going to win anyways, barring some kind of disaster, but having both a left wing candidate and a centrist going up against him would likely lock it in for sure. Even if it was Joe Biden or another centrist candidate against Schultz, he would almost certainly draw enough votes away to ensure President Trump one. 

So why did Schultz run fail? I think the back injury is one obvious reason. If you are too injured to campaign and go to events there is no real chance to get your name out there. Hell, Hillary Clinton's health issues hurt her pretty badly in 2016 and she was still able to go to events. If you can't even get out of bed you aren't going to be president. Period. 

That explains a lot of it, but I think Schultz got zero help from the establishment media. They did not want to cover someone to the right of them who could potentially split the Democratic vote. They may have some disagreements on who the next president should be but none of them want a centrist and none of them want President Trump to win. This means that I fully expect 3rd party candidates are going to be completely ignored in 2020 unless the media thinks they will take voters away from President Trump.

Finally, I still don't really know what Howard Schultz stood for. He claimed to be running a centrist campaign but I never really heard too much about what he wanted to do policy wise. He did criticize President Trump and occasionally the far left, but he never really said what he wanted to do for Americans, at least not in a way that actually got his message across. 

I, of course, wanted Schultz to run. Not just because it would hand the 2020 race to President Trump on a sliver platter, but because the Democratic Party needs a wake-up call. They are letting the lunatics run the asylum and have not so much fell off the slippery slope but jumped off of it while running at full speed. 

The party has gone so far to the left it's impossible to imagine a centrist candidate like Howard Schultz or a "Blue Dog" Democrat like Jim Webb running, let alone winning the candidacy. It seems clear that there is a political reorganization going on here and I think it ends with a Democratic Party so far to the left that it can no longer win elections nationally. Centrists will likely either form a new party or run into the open arms of the GOP.